ARTicles vol. 2 i.3b: Preparing for the Party

Harold Pinter grew up during one of the most devastating periods of British history. Born in 1930, he was evacuated twice during the Second World War, though he was in London’s East End for some of the most ruthless bombing campaigns of the Blitz. As a teenager he saw streets obliterated, watched his backyard garden go up in flames, and endured endless nights in complete darkness. “The blackout … left a sharp memory,” Pinter recalled to his biographer, Michael Billington. “You lived in a world in which in winter after five o’clock it was totally black … with chinks of light flashing on the horizon. … It was also a world that was highly sexual … there was a sexual desperation about the place. People really felt their lives could end tomorrow.” The memory of those pitch-black nights would resurface years later in The Birthday Party, a play in which a game of blind man’s buff turns into a disorienting, violent, sexually frenzied nightmare. The terror of the war helped awaken Pinter’s political consciousness. In October of 1948, in the middle of the Berlin Airlift, he was called up for National Service. Pinter immediately registered as a conscientious objector. “I was aware of the suffering and of the horror of war,” he remembers, “and by no means was I going to subscribe to keeping it going.” He was summoned before two military tribunals and went through two civil trials – degrading experiences that gave him a distaste for governmental bureaucracy. An outspoken critic of U.S. foreign policy in Latin America and the Middle East, Pinter has resisted pressure to conform his whole life. At the end of The Birthday Party, as Goldberg and McCann are dragging Stanley away, Petey tells him, “Stan, don’t let them tell you what to do!” In a 1988 interview with Mel Gussow, Pinter reflected, “All Petey says is one of the most important lines I’ve ever written … I’ve lived that line all my damn life.” Like many of Pinter’s plays, The Birthday Party was inspired by an experience from his life. In 1954, he stayed at a filthy boarding house while on tour as an actor in the seaside town of Eastbourne. In those digs he met an overbearing landlady and her solitary lodger – the prototypes for Meg and Stanley. “I said to the man one day, ‘What are you doing here?'” remembers Pinter. “And he said, ‘Oh well I used to be … I’m a pianist. I used to play in the concert-party here and I gave that up’. . . . And when I asked why he stayed, he said, ‘There’s no where else to go.’ That remark stayed with me and, three years later, the image was still there and … this idea came to me about two men coming down to get him.” Hemingway’s short story “The Killers” gave Pinter models for his two hit men, and in 1957, the same year he wrote The Room and The Dumb Waiter, he finished The Birthday Party. Like many of his early works, the play abounds in ambiguity and mystery. Before rehearsals for the 1958 London premiere began, the director Peter Wood asked the twenty-seven-year-old playwright for clarification. “We agreed,” Pinter responded, “the hierarchy, the Establishment, the arbiters, the socio-religious monster arrive to effect alteration and censure upon a member of the club who has discarded responsibility … towards himself and others.” But the playwright refused to make any kind of moral judgements about his characters or to write an explanatory note that would specify the menace that pervades the play. The uncertainty and doubt that Pinter sustains throughout The Birthday Party confused and angered many of London’s critics in 1958. Harold Hobson was one of the few who recognized and praised Pinter’s use of ambiguity as a dramatic device. “The fact that no one can say precisely what it is about,” Hobson wrote, “or give the address from which the intruding Goldberg and McCann come, or say precisely why it is that Stanley is so frightened by them is, of course, one of its greatest merits. It is exactly in this vagueness that its spine-chilling quality lies.” A play of blindness and blackouts, The Birthday Party keeps its characters and its audience in the dark. Did Stanley defect from an organization? Does he know Goldberg and McCann? Are these outsiders figments of Stanley’s imagination – personifications, as some critics have suggested, of the Judeo-Christian tradition come to reintegrate a renegade into polite society? Where have they come from? Where are they going? Pinter denied Peter Wood’s request for clarification, and answered his questions by posing a more frightening one of his own: “Couldn’t we all find ourselves in Stanley’s position at any given moment?” Ryan McKittrick is the A.R.T.’s Associate Dramaturg.